When Good Grammar Gets Snobbish

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John McWhorter

Opinion

When Good Grammar Gets Snobbish

April 16, 2026,

3:00 p.m. ET

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Pablo Delcan

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John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

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There it was on public radio — bad grammar!

“As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch — TCM, the Turner Classic Movies channel,” the host said at the

opening of an episode

of “This American Life.”

I’m a fan of old movies too, so I appreciated the sentiment. But that sentence contained what grammarians call a dangling modifier.

The idea is that a descriptive phrase without a subject, like “As a middle schooler,” has to refer to the subject of the main clause. A sentence like “Caring deeply about her children, the quality of the schools concerned my mother” makes it seem as if the quality of the schools was what did the caring. We are supposed to say, “Caring deeply about her children, my mother was concerned about the quality of the schools.”

Therefore, the radio host should have said, “As a middle schooler, I always wanted to watch one channel …”

Except, the host’s choice of words was a natural way of speaking. We don’t need to be training people to look down upon perfectly comprehensible speech.

There are times when the dangling modifier rule makes sense, when a dangler makes a sentence awkward or unclear, like “After fighting the fire for three hours, the ship sank in flames.” Add a subject to the modifier: “After firefighters battled the fire for three hours, the ship sank in flames.” Or “Not having studied the lab manual carefully, the experiment was a failure,” which makes it sound as if the experiment hadn’t studied. Better to say, “Not having studied the lab manual carefully, they failed in their experiment.”

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